Prospectus-ing

 I sat on the committee for a doctoral prospectus defense this afternoon, part of a marathon day of solid classes and meetings. 

The defense lasted over two hours, well past what such affairs usually last. I was part of the problem. The prospectus had to do with theatre, and I was the expert in the room. (I wasn't supposed to be; I was just there as a "dean's representative.") I talked too much.

But the bigger issue had to do with a common problem in doctoral prospectuses: the proposal was too big. 

Doctoral students spend years in coursework absorbing enough of some large critical conversation to perceive a gap or lacuna in the scholarship. Their dissertation intervenes in the conversation to repair that gap: "They say . . . But I say . . ."  

Sometimes--oftentimes--the gap they find is huge. Especially when the subject matter is (or becomes) near and dear to the student's identity, the need to fix the conversation can grow urgent and enormous. They propose a project to satiate that need, shifting the entire field.

Such ambitions generally exceed the reach of most dissertation projects. They describe the work of a career (or several careers) rather than the work of a single dissertation. 

The dissertation, I tell students, isn't the only or final thing you'll ever write on this topic. I encourage them to think of the diss more as "volume 1" (or "Notes toward volume 1") of a multi-volume project. 

Turning the two-big proposal into a doable project often involves letting some planned sites fall away, zeroing in on one aspect of the larger issue, and/or making a simpler narrative out of a complicated web. It stings to lower one's sites at the prospectus stage. It feels like failure.

Most of the time, though, starting work on the actual dissertation quickly proves what the dissertation committee already knows: there's more than enough to write about. The work expands to fill a dissertation-sized volume. Close engagement with the site itself--the archive, the dataset, the texts--inevitably changes the course of research. You find so much more to talk and write about than you had originally imagined.

And then there's the deadlines. At my institution, a strict seven-year clock starts ticking from the first semester. Students can't languish in research and writing forever. Eventually they have to end their project because the clock runs out. 

The deadline works in the student's favor. Past a certain level, one can feel as if the research is never enough. As we say in theatre: productions always need about two more weeks of rehearsal. They open not because they're ready but because opening night is set, the tickets already sold. Similarly, we tell students, "A good dissertation is a done dissertation." You conclude not because you've said all there is to be said but because the defense date is set, the committee committed. 

I say this, of course, knowing that--past the pristine scenario of the dissertation--I'm terrible at actually following through with research and writing myself. I can do it for conferences, partly because (like productions) they're set. Put up or shut up. But other than that, deadlines are hard to create and enforce on your own. 

It doesn't feel like that for dissertators, though. Ah, well. They'll learn.